Apple's Steve Jobs is negotiating personally with Hollywood studios, standing firm on a flat $9.99 price for all movies, according to Variety magazine. But that's holding up the deal, because movie studios want a tiered pricing scheme, giving them a $19.99 cap on movie prices, with older films going for $9.99. One studio executive close to the negotiations said,

"We can't be put in a position where we lose the ability to price our most popular content higher than less popular stuff," said a studio exec close to the negotiations."

Still undetermined also is the image resolution of the downloadable movies, where currently the iTunes Music Store video downloads are offered in a low-rez 320x240 resolution, suitable for iPods and portable devices but whose quality is vastly inferior to that of DVDs that consumers can rent from Netflix for Blockbuster for a fraction of $19.99. One thing's certain, and we're sure that Steve Jobs knows this: anyone who downloads a 320x240 movie for $19.99 is a fool. Even $9.99 is too high.

What do you think? Let's have a vote. Download movie price poll after the jump. – Charlie White

Apple, studios reportly at pricing impasse on movie downloads [ars technica]

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